Agenda

Day 1: Monday, September 14, 2026

TimeProgramSpeaker
All DayBadge Pickup (Atrium)
7:30 AM – 8:30 AMBreakfast (Atrium)
8:30 AM – 9:00 AMOpening Remarks
– Introduction and History of AI Core
– Remarks from UVA (Host Institution)

Thomas Potok (ORNL)
Laurie McMahon (UVA)
9:00 AM – 9:45 AMKeynote: TBD
Session Chair: Madhav Marathe (UVA)
Georgia Tourassi (ORNL)
9:45 AM – 10:15 AMCoffee Break (Atrium)
10:15 AM – 11:45 AMTalk Session
Session Chair: TBD
10:15 AM – 10:45 AMMechanistic Interpretability of Protein Folding in Alphafold 2 and ESM 2Aidong Zhang (UVA)
10:45 AM – 11:15 AMTopology-Driven Diffusion for Adverse Spatio-Temporal Event SurveillanceYulia Gel (VT)
11:15 AM – 11:45 AMAdvances in Neuromorphic ComputingRobert Patton (ORNL)
11:45 AM – 12:45 PMLunch
12:45 PM – 1:45 PMPanel Discussion: Free Hypothesis, Expensive Truth, and Multiagent Systems in Discovery
Moderator: Ferdinando Fioretto (UVA)
YY Ahn (UVA), Tom Hartvigsen (UVA), Dongkuan Xu (NCSU), and Guojing Cong (ORNL)
1:45 PM – 2:30 PMKeynote: AI Agents, Guardrails, and the Pace of Scientific Discovery
Session Chair: Ramakrishnan Kannan (ORNL)
Ryan Wright (UVA)
2:30 PM – 3:00 PMCoffee Break (Atrium)
3:00 PM – 4:30 PMTalk Session
Session Chair: TBD
3:00 PM – 3:30 PMAI in High-Stakes Allocation: Judgment and UncertaintySanmay Das (VT)
3:30 PM – 4:00 PMNavigating Scientific Knowledge: Toward Autonomous and Personalized AI ScientistsTyler Derr (Vanderbilt)
4:00 PM – 4:30 PMDual Inductive Biases In Brain EvolutionNabil Imam (GT)
4:30 PM – 5:30 PMGenesis Mission Project Panel
Session Chair: Forrest Hoffman (ORNL)
Prasanna Date (ORNL), Ramakrishnan Kannan (ORNL), Xiuwen Liu (FSU), Ferdinando Fioretto (UVA), Joshua Fu (UTK)
6:30 PM – 8:30 PMBanquet Dinner
Briefing on the Genesis Mission Platform
ORNL AI CORE 2027 Workshop

Zach Mayes (ORNL)
Xiuwen Liu (FSU)

Day 2: Tuesday, September 15, 2026

TimeProgramSpeaker
All DayBadge Pickup (Atrium)
7:30 AM – 8:40 AMBreakfast (Atrium)
8:40 AM – 9:00 AMOpening Remarks
– Summary of Day 1 & Plans for Day 2
– An Invitation to Collaborate

Prasanna Date (ORNL)
9:00 AM – 9:45 AMKeynote: Power-Aware Computing in the Age of AI
Session Chair: Prasanna Date (ORNL)
Kirk Cameron (VT)
9:45 AM – 10:15 AMCoffee Break (Atrium)
10:15 AM – 11:15 AMPanel Discussion
Moderator: Michael Parks (ORNL)
Hai Li (Duke)
Guannan Zhang (ORNL)
Stephen Turner (UVA)
Dawei Zhou (VT)
Raju Vatsavai (NCSU)
11:15 AM – 1:15 PMPoster Session & Lunch
See poster details
1:15 PM – 3:00 PMTalk Session
Session Chair: TBD
1:15 PM – 1:45 PMDeep Learning Guided Discovery of Synthetically Complex Peptides using Hierarchical Graph NetworksCamille Bilodeau (UVA)
1:45 PM – 2:15 PMEdge AI: Everything, Everywhere, All at OnceYiran Chen (Duke)
2:15 PM – 2:45 PMTalk 10Ashish Gautam (ORNL)
2:45 PM – 3:00 PMClosing RemarksRamakrishnan Kannan (ORNL) and Xiuwen Liu (FSU)